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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit Swithop.com today. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we answer a listener question goes like this. Joshua, I'm making $200,000 a year and I'm miserable. Can you help me build a plan to escape?

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. I'm your escape artist architect trying to help you design a plan to live a rich life now while also building a plan for complete financial freedom in 10 years or less. I've gotten a little bit away from doing Q&A on the show.

I love doing it. And today we're bringing it back with a doozy of a question. Question goes basically like this. Listener writes in. We're going to call this listener Brian. Brian says, Joshua, I'm a fairly new listener and I've been going through some of your older podcasts to absorb as much info as possible.

I think that you could potentially provide some good advice that I'd love to hear answered in an upcoming podcast if possible. Since discovering your show, I completely changed my thoughts on savings and consumption. I've always lived pretty frugally, I thought, but it turns out I was making poor decisions all along.

I bought a house last year thinking that was a foolproof way to hang on to my money. I only just ran the numbers this month since I've discovered your podcasts on home ownership and I've discovered that I would have been much better off renting. I've also cut my cell phone bill in half and I've cut back on my weekend golf habit, which I was spending about $200 a month on.

In place of that, I've decided to train for a triathlon, which is free since I already have a decent road bike. Brian, be careful. The entrance fees on those triathlons are huge or they can be if you're going to Ironman. So thank you for all those tips on savings.

I'm continuing to find ways to save. My situation that I'd like your advice on is my current job. I'm an engineer making just south of $200,000 a year. I'm working at a nuclear power plant in the middle of nowhere, Georgia. The closest town is Augusta, which is still a 50-plus minute commute each way.

I'm single, 30 years old, and living in a trailer in the woods near the plant wouldn't help that situation. I'm working 50 hours a week plus the commute and a 30-minute unpaid lunch break. My entire week is consumed by work and travel to work. This is a paperwork-heavy desk job, which brings me zero fulfillment.

I would love to quit and chase short-term seasonal outage work, but my dividend and investment income isn't nearly enough to live off, and I can't justify turning down this kind of steady income stream. I'm miserable, but well-paid. I'm afraid that if I quit, my experience level isn't enough to land me the highly sought-after seasonal work I'd be trying to get.

I believe you were likely in a similar pay scale when you quit your job, and since your situation was similar to mine, I'd like your advice as to how to get more enjoyment out of life and work. Love, the podcast, Brian." Brian, here's the deal. I'm going to answer your question, but before I do, I can't forget to cover sponsor of the day today.

One sponsor today, which is Trade King, the official brokerage supplier of Radical Personal Finance. Trade King, this business arrangement that I have with Trade King, worked out after I met them at FinCon 2015. I'd been looking for a company to work with, especially in this space, trying to find companies that can serve you, my listening audience, and Trade King came to my attention.

Started to do some research on it, but I waited to make a decision until I was able to meet the CEO. I interviewed the CEO, Don Montanaro, on the show from the floor of FinCon 2015 this last year, and we hit it off. I really enjoyed talking to him.

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They've got all the tools that you need and good service. Plus, even better, they have great prices. $4.95 trades, which I don't know how they do it. Don says they're either the lowest or second lowest in the industry. I don't know how they do it and still give good customer service, but I hear tons of good things.

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That helps them give credit to me for sending you their way and helps them track the performance of their ad campaign here on the show. Go to TradeKing.com/radical, sign up for an account, get a $100 bonus credited to your account. Brian, maybe you should do that in today's show.

You could do it with dividends. All right. Brian, I hear the pain in your email. I think the listeners do, but we've got to start with a little bit of a reality check. I'm not making fun of you in this email. I've been in your situation. I know the feeling.

I've written emails to people from a place of despondency myself. You go back and read those emails when you're in a different emotional framework and you've got to laugh at yourself. This email was sent on a Tuesday at 2.32 p.m., so I know you're sitting there typing this out at work, despondent at your desk.

I've been there. So I'm not making fun of you, but I am just a little bit to put this into perspective. I'm miserable but well-paid. Where is it? It says, "This is a paperwork-heavy desk job, which brings me zero fulfillment." Now, I understand the idea of not having a great enthusiasm for your work.

I remember the closest I've come to this was when I worked in the marketing and brand management consulting business for a year after college, and I was doing this technical analysis work. Most of my day involved working in spreadsheets, and I wasn't doing research for big beverage companies and beer companies and Burger King and McDonald's type of companies.

Just looking through these clients and reading all this consumer data of people describing their need states and how they were feeling when they wanted to go home, I could tell you all the needs that all these different restaurants are pitched to, are oriented to. Where does Boston Market make their market share and how does Olive Garden succeed?

What's their strategy? I would read this stuff, and I really was not all that enthusiastic about it. I worked hard to try to do a good job at it, but I just didn't really care. I was in a similar situation to you. I was a little bit miserable but well-paid.

My favorite time of the day was my lunch break when I would leave and go to the bookstore and read the personal finance section at the bookstore to get out of the office for a little while. So I've been there. But put it in perspective. Your life is really not all that bad.

And I would encourage you, if you have not been out of the country in a little while, set yourself up a trip. And the first thing you should do with your money, I as your official virtual financial advisor hereby decree that this is what you should do. Take a week of vacation, maybe two, and choose a country in the world that's not nearly as prosperous as the United States.

If you don't have a passport, get one. I'd recommend, I mean, let's see, where would I send you? Guatemala, if you speak Spanish. Maybe Dominican Republic. If you are super adventurous, well, if you're not a seasoned traveler, I would steer you away from Haiti. It's just too tough of a place to travel.

But pick a place in the world that doesn't have quite the same standard of living that we have here. Pick a place in the world where there are men and women sleeping in the streets. Pick a place in the world where when you go to the dumps of that city, go to the basurero in Guatemala City and visit with some of the families that are living there in the dump.

Best thing I would recommend is find some kind of -- here would be the way that you should do this. Find a service organization, whether that's just an organization that goes and works in these companies. Find a mission that you can volunteer at. Find some way to get yourself into some people who are pretty needy in the world and spend a week living with them, living as they live.

And see if that doesn't help you to adjust your mindset a little bit. Every time I travel, I always come back with an appreciation of the opportunity that I have. And it's easy to lose sight of that because what happens is we tend to become introspective people. So looking in, we tend to notice everything that's wrong.

I find this often. I'm always noticing everything that's wrong with my life and my business. And I'm all stressed out about it and I don't take time to appreciate the good stuff. So take some time and set something up where you can get out of your normal state and you can get into a different environment and have an opportunity to gain some appreciation for the opportunity that you have.

It's pretty easy for me to give financial advice in a U.S. American context. I have no idea how to give financial advice in some places in the world. So you've got it good is my point. And there are some ways that you can change it. So I recommend you take a trip.

Schedule and take a trip. I also recommend that you work really hard on finding something that you care about in the job that you're doing. Search for it and find something that you really care about in the context of what you're doing. If you don't care about the job, I don't know if you care.

I don't really personally have an enthusiasm for nuclear power. Then care about the way that you do the job and recognize that that's going to be the stepping stone for you to go from where you are to the next stage. Care about the people that you're interacting with. Care about the impact of your work.

Focus on bringing some kind of great value and work really hard to develop while you're making an escape plan. Develop an appreciation for some of the good things. It's hard for me to imagine a better scenario than what we're going to talk about. A better scenario than you in the situation you're in that we're going to talk about as I sketch out kind of just some ideas on a jump plan.

So I recognize that you're not really enjoying all that much about your life and your work. But, dude, you got it pretty good. You got it really, really good. And if you start with a basis of appreciation, it'll make the journey a lot better. The next thing that you've got to do, in addition to putting in perspective where you are, is you should spend most of your time working to develop a vision, a clear vision of where you're going to go with some guesses on ways for you to get there.

Working at something when you don't have a vision is draining. If you don't have a vision of why you're doing what you're doing or what you're trying to accomplish, it's not hard to have a lot of energy behind it. But if you had a sick niece or a sick nephew – let's go with niece.

You're a dude, so you probably have a little soft spot for, let's say, a beautiful little three-year-old girl who's a niece of yours. And she was struggling with cancer. And she was guaranteed to have a terminal illness, but there was some possible experimental research study that she could be in.

But it's going to suck $170,000 a year out of your life, and you're the one who has the opportunity to do it and earn the money and pay for that. Could you imagine that changing your enthusiasm a little bit? If I went through a long emotional – and you could do this later – but just picture a favorite niece.

If you don't have one, then picture somebody that you really like, some cute little girl that you really like. And think about how if your income and the benefits, the fruit of your labor could change her life. Think about that and ask yourself if you wouldn't be a little bit more enthusiastic out of going to work.

My reason for giving that example is because oftentimes the actual circumstances of our work don't really matter. I did a podcast recently called "Forget Retiring Comfortably Until You've First Focused on Working Comfortably." And I talked about my formula for working comfortably is do work that you care about for reasons that are important to you with people that you like in a place that you want to be.

And that's a four-part formula for you to go through and optimize each of those things that you want to do. But if you have work that you care about, you're doing it for a reason, you care about how you're doing the work, you care about something related to the work, and you're doing it for a reason that's important to you, you can do the same work as somebody else is miserable in and you can be thrilled with it.

If you're engaged in – I don't need to labor the point any longer. It should be self-evident. If you just simply focus on your reasons for doing something, you can do exactly the same job and have a very different attitude and approach. So focus on the reasons and the benefits, and you have an exciting future that can be built upon this job.

So put those things in perspective. You might feel miserable at the moment, at the moment that you're writing me the email, but realistically, you've got a pretty good life and you are very well paid. And to focus on getting more enjoyment out of life and work, I would recommend that you get a vision of why you're doing it.

We can do anything for a short period of time. And with a job and a situation like you have in front of you, you can break free of this thing in a very short amount of time. Let's talk about that. So what would I do if I were in your situation?

Well, the key is that vision, getting very, very clear on the vision. Get as clear as you can on the vision and try to figure out what the next steps would be. Depending on your vision, this is very much going to influence and affect the steps that you take.

Could you chuck it all today and go and wander around the country or the world as an itinerant traveler? You could. Is that the best move for you? Maybe. Maybe a little patience is in order, though. If it were me, based upon the circumstances that you're describing, personally, I would be a little bit patient.

Now, you mentioned in your email to me, you said, I think you were in a similar situation. You said making income and you had to jump. Let me set the record straight for your benefit. The reason that I had to take the drastic jump that I did was simply because if I didn't, there was no way for me to ever make a jump.

Or let me be more specific, it would have been a long time for me to ever make the jump. I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do. I had a clear vision of how it could be done, how I thought it should be done. I didn't know if it would work, but there was no way for me to test it without taking the jump.

And it was an extremely expensive jump for me to take. You don't have that situation. You're not legally constricted from speaking in public. I was. I walked away from not only a decent income, but I walked away from a very healthy passive income in order to go to something that was no income.

So I do not recommend that approach. I did it because I felt I needed to and I felt I was timing the market. I saw an opportunity. I said now is the time. I was timing the market of the growth of podcasting. I knew if I waited a year or two years, I wouldn't be able to have an early mover advantage.

I was convinced that I was at a place of preparation. I was at a place of clarity. I was at a place where I had a message. I had a content. I had something that was unique and different. I didn't see anybody operating that space. I was watching the marketplace, watching the marketplace, and I said I want the early mover advantage.

And so I went ahead and took the jump. But put yourself in this mental state. When I left the firm I was with, I had basically between $3,000 to $4,000 a month of passive income. And passive income meaning that wasn't what I did with additional work. It was just $3,000 to $4,000 a month of passive income.

I could live on just about that. So I'd spent five or six years building that base up of passive income. And that was my whole goal all along. Now if I could have kept that, think of how much better my situation would have been. If I could have kept that and worked on the side.

I couldn't. So I walked away from $3,000 to $4,000 a month. Let's just be conservative because it would change rates. Let's just say $3,000 a month. Let's underestimate. I walked away from $3,000 a month of passive income to $0 a month having to trade a part-time job and a time-consuming business for kind of the comfortable situation that I had worked and built.

I don't recommend it. It's doable. I've done it. It's okay. But it's not a very comfortable experience. Far better for you to build where you are and take advantage of the situation that you have. You're young. You're single. You have a high income. And your income is not restricting you from doing other things with your life.

If it were me and I were in your shoes, knowing what I know based upon the few details that you've shared with me here in this email, there's not a chance in the world I would leave that job until I'd built a solid financial plan of financial independence. You could be there in a few years.

At this stage in your life, single, 30 years old, energy, I think a good normal work week should be about 60 hours a week. Now, if you have something compelling that's causing you to do something else, you have a compelling thing, whatever it is, fine. But most people in your situation, most of your buddies and you probably, you don't have something compelling.

It's just frittering away time. This is the time to build your empire. This is the time to put a foundation under your life that can change the course of your life forever. You ought to be putting in about 60 hours a week, 40 hours a week at a job, and about 20 hours a week on side projects, whether that's building your investment expertise, whether that's building a side business, whether it's making the connections that you need so that you can make a solid jump into this seasonal itinerant work that you would prefer to do.

What else do you have to do with your time? You've got 168 hours a week. Let's say that you take one day off a week. I think that's a good plan. Take one day off a week. I don't work Sundays. That means you've got six days left. Put in 10 hours a day, the other six days, and there's 60 hours a week.

Now, try to arrange your life. You're already putting in probably 10 to 12 hours a day, depending on how your commute schedule works at your job. Arrange your life to minimize the wasted time. But plan on about a 60-hour work week at this stage of your life. I think that's really doable.

It's doable on an ongoing basis. It's not excessive. It gives you plenty of time for rest and relaxation. But make 40 hours a week at your job and put 20 hours a week in on your side projects. Once you have the vision, and that may take some time, and let's talk about what to do if you have it and what to do if you don't.

If you don't have the vision, and it sounds to me like at the moment you would think that you'd like to do that seasonal itinerant outage work. That sounds fun to me. I would enjoy that if I were in a similar situation to you. But it doesn't sound like you have something more compelling, like more clear than that.

You're not telling me, "I want to take a year off and go to Europe." If you do, cool. We could do that. But once you have the vision, make sure that you're just focusing on what are the next steps. If you don't have the vision, you might as well take advantage of what you got and build a plan for yourself.

Build a plan for financial freedom, total independence from dividend income in three or four years. That's going to be the basis of what I want to talk to you about. But if you don't have the vision, don't run away from something good. Pile up money because you ask any old person, you're not going to regret.

If you wake up at 33 years old and you got a half a million dollars or $750,000 sitting in a bank account because of the work that you've done from 30 to 33, you're not going to regret those three years of work. It's going to set you up for the rest of your life.

Here's what I would do. I would dump this 50-minute commute. If I were single in the situation you described in Georgia, I would buy a pickup truck and a truck camper. I'd get a nice big one so it's comfortable, but I'd buy a pickup truck and a truck camper.

I'd rent my house out and I'd live in the pickup truck/truck camper. Now you said in your email, you already took that option away from me because you said living in a trailer in the woods near the plant wouldn't help your dating situation. Let's talk about that for a moment because obviously I'm predictable.

I'm going to tell you, move into a truck camper. Let's talk about that for a moment. Would it hurt your dating situation? Well, you'd be a weirdo. But that's all right. I've been a weirdo for most of my life and I actually recommend it. It's a lot more fun than being normal.

But why wouldn't you? One of the key mistakes that young men make is they think about, "Well, I've got to do something to impress a girl. I've got to present something to impress a girl." Here's my challenge for you. Are you going to do a bait and switch on a girl?

Are you going to try to lead her and impress her with some aspect of your life that you're then going to change when you get married? Because if right now you build a very, very stable, very traditional lifestyle, you have a three-bedroom, two-bath house in a nice city, a red brick house in a nice city in Georgia, you drive a Honda Civic, a three-year-old Honda Civic, and you commute 50 minutes away to your engineering job, and you find a girl and you say, "Hey, I'm interested in you." You guys build a relationship.

And then all of a sudden you say, "By the way, what I actually want to do is I want to quit this engineering job and I want to go travel around the world or I want to go travel around the country as an itinerant outage worker." That's not a very good bait and switch.

So you've got to be exactly the type of person now before you're married as you're going to be after you're married. You need to present exactly the type of person that you are. Don't engage in false advertising. That's a good way to falsely advertise your way into a relationship that then you got to falsely get your way out of.

So what I would recommend is get clear on what you want to do and then get clear on your plans. Living in a truck camper, if you don't want to live in – the truck camper thing is in some ways a metaphor, and I'm going to explain why I recommend it.

But it's not about the truck camper. The point is do something radical now and don't be scared to do whatever it is that you want to do now. And what you'll find is that the appropriate woman will be attracted to you because of who you are. The very best advice I ever got, and I did not do this myself, but I just recognize in retrospect is the very best advice that I have now given to others.

Best advice I ever got is if you were interested in attracting to yourself the woman of your dreams and recognize those words that I use. So if you're interested in attracting to yourself the woman of your dreams, that's unusual language, here's what you got to do. Number one, sit down and make a list of every single aspect of the woman of your dreams.

Write down every character quality. Write down every personality trait. Write down every physical feature. Write down every lifestyle feature. Write down the perfect list of exactly the type of woman that you want. Take that aside. Put it aside for a night. Come back the next day and take a look at it and ask yourself, "Is this really it?" If it's not, tear it up and start again.

But write down exactly the type of woman that you would like to be married to. Next, take a look at that list and write down exactly the type of man that that type of woman would be attracted to. Put it down in as much exhaustive detail as you want.

And then the big question is ask yourself, "Am I that man?" And if you're not, the key thing for you to not focus on, don't focus on going out and trying to find the woman. Focus on becoming the man that your dream woman would be attracted to. I'm taking this little tangent away from the finances because I think this is something that a lot of people make a mistake on.

It dramatically affects their finances. It's obvious that in the email that you wrote to me, it's obvious that it has an influence on you. But let's say that for you, you would like to be married to a woman who has an adventurous attitude. That's important to me. That's one of the character qualities that I love about my wife.

She has an adventurous attitude. Would you expect a woman with an adventurous attitude to be attracted to somebody who is living a boring, same old humdrum existence? Or would you expect a woman with an adventurous attitude to be attracted to somebody who is willing to tackle an adventure in their own life?

For me, one of the – I hesitate to use the word regret because I try not to regret things in the past. One of the things which if knowing what I now know, I were going to go back to 18 and kind of start my adult life over, one of the things I would have done differently is I would have made sure that I made plans and arrangements so that when I married my wife, we married at 26, I would have been ready to take a year off at that point in time and I would have taken on a one-year honeymoon.

In retrospect, I would have told our friends, "Listen, come to the wedding. We're going to have a nice big party at a local restaurant. You're going to pay for yourself. If you want to give us a gift, great, but what we would really love would be cash." And what I would have done is instead of taking a two-week honeymoon, I would have taken a year honeymoon and traveled the world with my wife.

That's what I would have done. Now, I don't care what you do or choose to do. I wasn't in a position at that point in time that I was able to do that in my business or otherwise. We had a great first year of marriage, but I wasn't in a position.

I had not put the plan in place. But the point I'd like to make to you is if that resonates with you, some people it does, doesn't, some people it doesn't, but if that resonates with you, could you imagine living a normal lifestyle and then suggesting to your fiance, "Hey, I think we should take a year off.

We should quit our jobs and go travel the world for a year," and her going for it if she didn't already know you were an adventurous type of person? So let me bring this tangent to a close and just say that you should be living the type of life that you want to live as a single person, and you should be the type of person who's going to attract the type of woman that you want to have in your life.

If that type of woman is going to be put off by your unusual approach, living in a trailer in the woods, then maybe you should reconsider. Now, there are some things you can do just because you're living in a trailer in the woods. If you had a beard like I have at this point in time and you wear flannel shirts every day and you chew tobacco and have some broken teeth, you might be fitting a stereotype that's going to scare that woman off.

So I don't recommend that. You might want to shave a little bit and spruce up. But you can take a so-called alternative lifestyle and you can adjust it to be non-scary and non-freaky. All you got to do is just start an Instagram channel, put it out there, and you'll find all kinds of people who love it.

The wonders of the Internet. Let me wrap up that tangent, but let me give you what I would do. Now, again, as a metaphor, what I would do is I'd buy a pickup truck camper and I'd live in that. I would drive it during the week and I would park it near my job at night.

And what that would do is that would free up, you said, a 50-plus minute commute each way. That would free up two hours a day of my life. I would find them in rural Georgia. It'd be crazy easy to find some homeowner or some farmer with a barn that you can park the thing behind at night.

You'd be totally comfortable. Get a nice big Lance, big old truck camper. Get a one-ton dually pickup truck. Get a nice comfortable one. That would free up a ton of time and a ton of energy and allow you to have kind of a cool lifestyle. If you're into something outdoors and you go and you can hit the fishing pole every day after work or whatever your version of that is, and then on the weekend if you want to go back to the town where most of your friends and networks and connections are, go back there and park it in the driveway of a buddy's house.

If you need a little break, get yourself a really nice high-class resort and go and stay in a hotel or do something like that. The reason I use that example is if you want to do seasonal outage work, you need to set your lifestyle up to where that's appropriate for you.

If you've got a house full of stuff and you've got four dirt bikes to take care of and a mud truck in the backyard and all this stuff that you're taking care of, then it's going to be a real hassle for you to be traveling all around the country doing seasonal outage work.

But if you've got a lifestyle that allows that mobile situation to be easier and you can just jump in your truck, and I don't know if you've got to drive one of the company's trucks or not, but if you can just jump in and take your house with you, you might be very comfortable.

There's people all over the country that do that. So go ahead and set up the lifestyle that you would like. Now take those two hours a day that you've freed up and take the money that you've freed up and invest that for your future. So it doesn't sound to me like you love your house.

If you don't love it, get rid of it. Practice some zero-based thinking, knowing what you now know. If you had to do it over again, would you do it any differently? It sounds to me, based upon the email that you've written to me, that knowing what you now know, if you were going to buy that house again, you probably wouldn't.

So then the question is, how do you get out and how quickly? Don't be an idiot and just jump. Make an intelligent plan and follow the plan. So perhaps you've got some – I won't go into the details of the house analysis, but you probably paid some expenses to buy it.

Maybe you would need to hold on to it for a few years. Maybe you should rent it out. Maybe you should just turn around and sell it and say, "Hey, if I've got to eat $10,000 of cost to free myself up to pursue this lifestyle that I'm dreaming of, no problem.

Go for it. That's up to you. Put the thing on Airbnb during the week and you go live it in the weekends. Figure something out that works in your context." But what I would do is free up that commute time, free up that lunch break time. If it were me, I'd go and work my job.

I'd go out to the truck. I'd have a nice lunch and work for 20 minutes and then I'd go back into my job. If you do that for a few years, let's run some math, $200,000 a year, pretend that you can live on $3,000 a month. And that in rural Georgia, I mean, frankly, I should use $2,000 a month, but whatever.

I mean you've got to buy – maybe you go out and you buy – I'm not recommending this, but for the sake of illustration, you go buy and you buy a brand new RV that's super comfortable to live in or a brand new pickup truck and a beautiful brand new truck camper and you put the thing on payments and you got $1,000 a month of payments.

You could do that. Just compare it to your rent. There's a great guy. I've tried to get him on the show. His website is WhereIsKyleNow. But a great guy. His name is Kyle. He did that years ago. He was a web developer. He got sick and tired of paying rent.

He went out and bought a brand new Volkswagen Touareg and a brand new Airstream trailer and he spent the next six years just traveling around the country and the world working from the road. So even if you had to do that, that would probably be a superior option. I would – personally, I'd recommend still pay attention to your numbers and buy used, but you got to do that.

Let's just say $3,000 a month. You should be able to live in Georgia a great lifestyle on $3,000 a month. I just finished my February expenses. My family of four plus two dogs, so we'll call it six depending on how we count. We spent $2,688 of personal expenses in the month of February, not including investments, not including investments, just personal, not including business expenses.

$2,688 for a family of four in West Palm Beach, Florida. So you should be able to live a nice lifestyle on $3,000 a month in rural Georgia. $200,000, pull off $36,000, you're left with $164,000. Pretend for a moment that we're going to ignore tax. You can't do that. Obviously, there's going to be some money with tax.

But just run some math or even better, let me make this more compelling. You rent out your house to cover your house payment and you wind up in a position where you can save $170,000 a year because of the additional income from your house. In five years of work, that's $850,000 of capital that you could save.

Do you know what you could do with $850,000 of capital? Perhaps five years is too long. Let's just say you're going to do it for three years. I forget what number I used, 170,000, I think I used those three. That's half a million dollars. In three years, you could save a half a million dollars of capital, investment capital.

Now back to your romance situation, imagine that you find a woman that you're interested in. She looks at you and thinks you're a little nuts because you live in an RV or a trailer out in the woods of Georgia as you put it. It sounds so country when you say it like that.

When I think of RVs, I think of living on the ocean here in Florida where I live. I don't think of a trailer park in rural Georgia. But I can understand if you spend a lot of time in rural Georgia, there's some broken down trailer parks driven through. Come down to Florida where I live and look at where I'd park my RV on the coastline of the ocean and you'd have a different perspective.

Pretend that you have a relationship with this woman. She finds out, yeah, you live in an RV. You're a little bit eccentric. But you tell her, hey, I've been working towards this thing. I've got a half a million dollars in the bank. I'm debt-free. I've got a great job.

I'm actually switching to this outage thing where it's the work that I really enjoy doing. By the way, on the side, I've been working to build up an investment portfolio. I can sit back at this point in time and I can just live on the dividends from my investment portfolio.

That's a couple thousand bucks a month. I've got a couple thousand dollars a month coming in from dividends from my investment portfolio. I figure if I take some of this fun outage work six months a year, that makes plenty of money where we can still save on that and we're just going to grow wealthier and wealthier and wealthier, and I can be fully retired at the age of 33.

Does that change your romance conversation a little bit? Does that change your likability a little bit? For most people, it would. It really would. You cannot beat having capital. It's possible that you've never experienced this, even though you may have a high income. Depending on how it is, it's possible that you don't know what it's like to have six figures sitting in a bank account, but you cannot beat the sense of freedom that comes with actually having capital because when you have financial capital, your world is open to you.

Now, I think that if those listeners who are listening who don't have financial capital to work from, I don't think it's a prerequisite to being able to build a plan for financial freedom. I've seen and known too many people who started with nothing and done it. So if you didn't have capital, I'd tell you let's work out a plan that'll make it work, but man, is it a lot easier if you've got investment capital.

That's what you can build. You could build three, four, five hundred thousand, a million dollars of investment capital. Now, while you're building that, is there any reason why you can't go ahead and make those connections? Because you need the experience in order to get you that seasonal work you want.

You need the connections in order to get you that seasonal work. So go ahead and get started building that. Now, I don't know if you have an entrepreneurial bent. I do, so it's hard for me to ever think of other people's situations like this without just at the end of an email where I don't know you and what makes you tick like I would if we were face-to-face.

But in a situation like you're describing to me here, I'd be working on something on the side. I have my own little deal that I was interested in. I don't know what that is for you, but I've got dozens of ideas for me. And then what I would be doing is while I'm working at the job, keep a little notepad on your desk and apply your mental strength to your job.

You owe your employer an honest day's work. But instead of surfing ESPN.com and figuring out your fantasy football thing, have that notepad open of your business that you're working on or your investment plan that you're working on or the companies that you're researching or the places that you want to go and be writing that stuff down.

Now all of a sudden, while you're working, your mind can also be enjoying building that vision. And what will happen is you probably won't make it three years. You'll probably make it one. And because you're focusing in on the plan, right now I'm building investment capital. My long-term vision is I want to be financially independent.

Okay, I'm building that. My short-term thing is I want to adjust from this lifestyle that I don't love to a lifestyle of itinerant outage work. Because you set that as a clear vision and you're working on it, you don't have to waste two hours a day sitting in the car.

If you're in the car, I don't know, put that time to use. But for me, I'd be up in the morning working on it, reading the books I needed to work on, enjoying the life today. During lunch break, write an article for your blog. Write a letter of introduction to the person that's running the organization and the nuclear power business that has the most exciting job.

Do research on the cutting-edge stuff and find out what the cutting-edge stuff is that you can apply your engineering prowess to. And about eight months or 16 months from now, you'll bumble into something. You'll make a connection with somebody. And all of a sudden, you'll know, "Oh, okay. Now here's the jump.

I can jump from this $200,000 job to this outage job making $100,000. That'll still allow me to save $70,000 a year. I've got $200,000, $300,000 sitting in the bank, so I'm totally fine. I've got a backup plan. I've got this business I'm working on the side. I've got the income coming in.

I've got the flexibility of life." And now you can make that jump. And now you go be a seasonal outage worker skiing in Colorado during the wintertime and doing outage work during this hurricane season, traveling all over the southeast or whatever the version is that applies to your situation.

To bring things to a wrap, I know that I'm putting a lot of my ideas into this. That's all I can do at the end of an email. But there's a method to the madness. There's a reason behind it. The truck camper is a metaphor. It's a metaphor for live like a broke person so you can get really, really rich in a short period of time and be able to enjoy a lifestyle of freedom from a young age.

That truck camper metaphor could mean renting a room in a house that's near your job in rural Georgia, some rooming house during the week and staying there where you can stay totally focused. Maybe on the weekends you're home at your fancy house with your nice pool and your buddies all coming over and going four-wheeling in the woods on the weekend.

But during the week you're laser focused on getting that degree or building that business or writing that website or making those connections or reading those nuclear engineering books, whatever it is. During the week you're laser focused and on the weekend you're totally off. It doesn't have to be the truck camper.

It could be the room. It could mean transitioning from rural Georgia where you're just kind of bored up to rural Alaska and doing six-month work up there where you're living in a camp out in the middle of the woods and then you're in Mexico during the pretty time. The metaphor is when you combine high income with very low expenses, in a very short period of time you create massive capital.

On a base of massive capital, your world of options for building businesses and investments opens up to you like you wouldn't believe. And when you do that now while you're single, it sets you up for a family life like you wouldn't believe. It sets you up to be able to be there with your kids.

It sets you up to be able to be there 24 hours. It sets you up to be able to enjoy those things. It sets you up to be able to take that one-year honeymoon trip with your wife. It opens up those opportunities. Any listener of this show who's been a little bit down the road will be listening to this saying, "Yeah, I wish I'd done that.

I wish I had had a better clarity when I was at that stage of life. I did the best I could with where I'm at." To repeat, it's no excuse for those of us who are at a different stage. My kids and my wife and my family are not a hindrance.

They're not hindering me one bit. But I certainly wish I'd been a little bit more responsive. I wish I'd known then what I know now is what I'd love to share. So that would be what I would do. Recognize that you're not all that miserable. You're simply miserable because you don't have a clear vision of what you're working on and you're not working on anything that excites you.

When I started Radical Personal Finance, I got to experience the joy of working something that excited me. There are two stories that I want to give to illustrate from my own experience the points I'm making. When I was a financial planner, I liked a lot of things having to do with the financial planner.

Specifically, I liked sitting and talking to people about money. I loved having conversations like this here. I question how effective I am in creating this as a monologue. I always question this. But in the form of a dialogue, when I can look into somebody's eyes, I know I have the ability to listen carefully to them and then to lay out a plan that brings them hope.

I've done it again and again and again and again with real people. And that's what I loved about being a financial planner. I loved being able to take somebody who was feeling hopeless, who was feeling stuck, and be able to chart out the vision and the plan for how if A, then B, if C, then how they could get from where they were to where they were going.

I didn't enjoy anything else associated with financial planning. I got to the point where I got sick and tired of doing the sales presentations, and that's death to you if your income depends upon sales presentations because I got bored. I didn't want to say the same thing again. I didn't want to repeat the same lines that I carefully crafted.

I'd sat down and built this powerful presentation. I didn't want to do it again and again and again. I wanted something new. I wanted to learn something new. So that's what wasn't a good fit for me as a financial planner. I was always changing course. I was always changing who I'd work with.

My poor managing director would always be so frustrated with me because I wouldn't do anything long enough to make it work. I'd just get something going, and then I'd be bored with it, and I'd want to toss it to the side and go off and study something new. Tired of working with young people?

Let me go work with retirees. All right. Tired of working with retirees? Let me go do multimillion-dollar estate planning and try to figure out how to become Palm Beach's biggest estate planner. Well, I don't really like that. Let me go and do group benefits. That was the course of my career, and that career didn't fit me well because of that.

It's just a personality. I could discipline myself to a certain extent to stay the course, but I'd just get bored. Once I'd mastered a subject, I'm done, ready to go on with it. Why do you think I have so many financial planning designations? I'm just bored with it. Got on to the next thing.

So I didn't love at the end. I didn't love my day-to-day thing because I'm just working, working, working, and it became a job. Same thing. I'm miserable but well-paid. Yeah, I was in the same situation. But then when I started Radical Personal Finance, I found myself getting up in the morning for two or three hours, waking up at 5 a.m., 4 a.m.

a couple days to work on my blog and figure out how do I install this plug-in and how do I launch a podcast and how do I do these things. And then at night I'd come home and have dinner with my wife and then stay up late working on it.

All of a sudden, the course of my days changed because I had a little bit of hope, had a little bit of vision. I said, "I can do this." I started the step. I said, "I can do this. I like this. This is good." Not great, but it was good.

My work days were completely different. That was why for me it was so devastating when I had to stop it all because all of a sudden I was back to the same humdrum existence and I was casting about, "Where is that next thing? Where is that next thing?" So when you're engaged and you have a purpose to what you're doing, if you had a purpose to financial independence, you have a three-year plan, got the sailboat picked out, you want to sail the Caribbean for 10 years.

Okay, I'm working on the sailboat, working on the sailboat, working on the sailboat, buying the sailboat, whatever it is. When you have the vision for what you're doing, then that humdrum work will start to be enjoyable to you. The other place in life I learned this was when I was in college.

I had a rough college experience for a few different things, but with regard to how much I enjoyed it and what I learned. My freshman year of school, I took a lot of classes, but I was still doing basic stuff and I want to cut the story short and just say that for the first couple of years, I found that I didn't really love a lot of the classes that I was taking.

I was not very respectful of the teachers, the professors who were teaching me. I was arrogant and I was not getting as much benefit out of it as I could. Through a series of circumstances, I wound up studying abroad my junior year, dropped out of school, and then decided to go back my senior year.

But at that point in time, I was working 40 hours a week doing graphics work at a company and I was taking a full course load. I mapped out every little bit of my day. I'd mapped out every single hour of the week of when I was going to be because in order to get my job to allow me the flexibility, I had to prove to them that I could work it in.

I had to deliver to my boss my class plan, the hours I had set aside for work, homework, or whatever, and I came in with a color-coded spreadsheet and presentation is everything, and I convinced them of it. So they gave me this job and they allowed me the flexibility.

I worked harder that year than I had worked any time before or since. I had two hours of scheduled fun, scheduled spontaneity. Saturday night, I think I took a couple hours off and relaxed. But what I found was that the work, because I had a clear vision at that time, I'm getting out of debt, getting out of debt, I got a clear goal, the work completely changed its character.

I never really loved the graphics work, but I found that I was happy to be doing it. I was focused. I had a plan for it. I was getting out of debt. And then my school all of a sudden changed, and I learned more my senior year. I got straight A's that year, and I learned more my senior year than I had learned in any year previous.

It was night and day. My professors all of a sudden became very intelligent leading professors. It was remarkable. What changed? The job didn't change. The classes didn't change. The professors were the same. What changed was I knew what I was doing and why. I had a clear goal. Now, I warn you, pay attention, the problem with having clear goals is once you achieve them, if you don't have the next one, it's easy to feel a sense of loss and a sense of purposelessness, and it's easy to wander.

That's a podcast for a different day. But for now, the answer to your question, "How do I get more enjoyment out of my life and work?" is build a clearer vision. If you don't know what that clear vision is, that's okay. Lots of time journaling, lots of time thinking, writing things down, trying different things, exploring different things.

But while you're casting about, searching for that vision, I beg you, take advantage of the opportunity that you have. Get a little radical, whatever that means to you. Get radical, cut expenses, increase income, and build that financial freedom for yourself in a couple of years. And I promise you, you will not regret it.

I'm trying to think of something to say that if you do regret it, here's when you can come back. But if you regret it, I don't know. You can trade places with somebody. Hope this is useful to you. I hope that my message – I'm a little concerned because I used the truck camper example.

I hope my message is loud and clear. That's a metaphor. For me, it would be a literal truck camper. But for you, it may be something different. But if you buy those options, man, you can be on a sailboat in the Bahamas or working at an orphanage in Romania or whatever it is that's important to you.

If any of the listeners have ideas on today's show, ways to help Brian out with his question, feel free to come by the blog post for today's show and share those with him. Brian, thanks for writing. I enjoyed answering the question. I hope you found value in it. Thank you to all of you who are listening to this show.

I appreciate each and every one of you. I would ask you if you would like to support the show, please consider becoming a patron of Radical Personal Finance. You can find all the details of that at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. I've recently simplified that program, simplified the options. I need to shoot a new video, and then I'll try to do a standalone episode on it.

But the only thing I haven't done there is just shot a new video and tweaked a few things. But you'll see if you go by RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron, you'll see that there are some new options there. I've simplified the rewards, simplified the benefits. I've removed all the rewards I wasn't able to deliver on before, and I've replaced them with rewards that I'm confident I can deliver on.

And also, you'll see those there with the different levels. I think it's $7 a month and $14 a month. But if you still just want to support the show and you pick a number, $8 a month or $3 a month or whatever, feel free to do that. I would ask if you gain benefit from the show, I really want this show to have as its base listener support.

That changes the dynamic for me, helps me not worry about advertisers, and helps me focus on serving you. So I would just ask you humbly to please consider supporting the show directly, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Until next time, thank you so much for listening, and I'll be back with you soon.